Military-ruled Myanmar kicked off constitutional talks on yesterday despite a boycott by the country's main opposition party, led by democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest.
The absence of the Nobel peace laureate, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) won elections in 1990 by a landslide but was denied power by the military, has stripped the convention of what little legitimacy it had, diplomats say.
The NLD opted out of the talks on Friday after the junta refused to free Suu Kyi and NLD vice chairman Tin Oo from a year of house arrest. They were detained last May following clashes between NLD and pro-government supporters.
A total of 1,076 delegates from all walks of life -- most of them handpicked by the government -- turned up for the talks in a tightly guarded military compound about 45km from the capital.
"In the interests of the nation and the people, the emergence of a state constitution is the duty of all citizens of this country," said convention head Lieutenant-General Thein Sein.
"We are now in this meeting hall to discharge this duty, which is of utmost importance," he said.
In opening remarks to an audience of generals in full military regalia, delegates and most of the diplomatic corps, he made no mention of the boycotting NLD members or Suu Kyi.
Representatives from the US and the EU, which have slapped sanctions on Yangon over Suu Kyi's detention, did not attend.
The junta hails the forum, which is meant to draw up the constitution Myanmar does not have, as a key step in its so-called "road map to democracy," unveiled last year in the face of intense diplomatic pressure to release Suu Kyi.
The junta says the convention will resume with the same six objectives underpinning previous talks which collapsed in 1996 following an NLD walkout. One of the objectives calls "for the military to play a leading role in the national politics of the future state."
Suu Kyi and Tin Oo were not among the 54 NLD delegates invited to the conference. Foreign journalists have also been barred, although local employees of international news organizations have been given some access to the talks.
The opposition demanded the junta water down the agenda for the latest convention and make its procedures more open and fair.
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